Providing humanity with sufficient nutritious food is a Herculean task that can only be achieved through a joint effort. Our initiatives seek to make a positive contribution toward meeting that challenge.

In a Munich, Germany office, 27-year-old CEO and co-founder, Maximilian Loessl, opens what looks like a small, stainless-steel refrigerator: instead, inside water circulates through stacked seedling boxes. High-powered LED lighting focuses on burgeoning plants like dill and basil, with distinctly crisp scents. This equipment allows a consumer to grow produce within a home kitchen; an App provides operating support. The product’s inventor, ‘agrilution’, is one of the companies leading the world in vertical farming.

agrilution – a vertical farming company in Germany

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Vertical farming is the production of food in vertically stacked layers or inclined surfaces, sometimes integrated within other structures; it is often used in urban areas with limited arable land. As the world’s population is projected to reach more than nine billion people by 2050, with particular growth in urban areas, sustainable and supplemental farming solutions are being searched for – and vertical farming is proving its potential.

The Munich Revolutionaries

User-friendly, sleek equipment based on visionary principles – Maximilian Loessl describes agrilution as a company that provides a technical approach for a grassroots movement in the food industry. “Our company name, agrilution, combines ‘agriculture’ and ‘revolution.’ We’d like to raise awareness for healthy food,” says Loessl. He adds that while the agrilution system cannot ‘solve’ the challenge of global food security, it can make a contribution in reinforcing overall health and sustainability: “Our vertical farming method uses up to 95 percent less water than conventional agriculture, as well as up to 60 percent less fertilizer.”

While the plants grown in this system are comparatively low calorie – including microgreens like coriander, parsley, chives, varieties of lettuce and herbs – they make up for this in nutrients: “Microgreens have up to 30 times higher nutrient levels than mature plants,” Loessl notes.

The company’s home growing devices – plantCubes – use broad spectrum wavelength LED lights. “This leads seedling plants to develop more biomass, attain faster growth, and develop richer nutrient levels,” states Loessl. Using a hydroponic method – growing plants in sponges, sand or liquid rather than soil – the system is a closed-water culture.

Our company name, agrilution, combines ‘agriculture’ and ‘revolution’. We’d like to raise awareness for healthy food.

The vertical farming method of agrilution uses up to 95 percent less water than conventional agriculture.

With a firsthand perspective, and experience as one of the founders of the non-profit Association for Vertical Farming, Loessl predicts that “vertical farming will become mainstream in higher-population cities within the next ten years. This ability to produce food year-round can provide more stability regionally and even globally.” Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) - a method of growing plants, including vegetables, inside closed systems like greenhouses to create a stable plant environment - along with related technology and LED lighting, according to Loessl, will provide the basis for vertical farms to flourish.

The Orchards on Orchard Road

In the 19th century, Singapore’s Orchard Road was an area of lush plantations – today, some of the greenery has returned. The skyline rooftops of Singapore’s Scape building are stacked eight rows high with seedlings and plants. Niyati Gupta is the CEO of Comcrop, Singapore’s first rooftop commercial farm. Up to 90 percent of Singapore’s food must be imported. “We don’t have a lot of land or space in Singapore. Our vision was to create a resilient local eco-system,” Gupta notes.

The Rise of the Vertical Farm

Looking up at Orchard Road in Singapore, it seems to be an ordinary urban skyline of skyscrapers, concrete and steel. The Scape building (center front) seems to have nothing unusual about it.

The top of the Scape building reveals its secret: the 557 square meters rooftop farm of Comcrop – Singapore’s first commercial rooftop farm. The space is actually 11-12 times smaller than a regulation European football field. Nonetheless, Comcrop can produce 10 times the volume of food that a horizontal farm could within the same size.

CEO Niyati Gupta guides Comcrop in its mission to be commercial, sustainable, and foster Singapore’s self-sufficiency: “We are doing our part to make the community conscious of what they eat and how we can produce it, right here.”

The heart of the system: 8-10 rows of horizontal pipes are vertically stacked to circulate nutrient-rich water via two systems: one is a pure hydroponics system, while the other is an aquaponics system supported by Tilapia fish. Solar panels power the water pumps, and netting protects the plants from insects.

In addition to regular professional staff, Comcrop trains members of the community, including retirees and the disabled, to become Ag professionals. Here, one of Comcrop’s staff begins harvesting new plants.

A wide range of crops are produced, such as herbs (particularly mint, as well as basil, shown here) and leafy green vegetables, including different kinds of lettuce.

Niyati Gupta and her team of Comcrop professionals are justly proud of their work: “Overall, vertical farming has a valuable place in the food chain,” says Gupta. “We see ourselves in the future owning and operating a whole network of farms. In Singapore, there are plenty of marginalized spaces that could be used.”

The current Comcrop system is divided between hydroponics and aquaponics. In their aquaponics system, tanks of Tilapia fish feed their waste, in the form of nitrates, to the seedlings and plants in the hydroponic system, which then feed their plant waste back to the fish. As Gupta observes, “this system creates a nice micro-ecosystem.” The other half of Comcrop is a pure hydroponic farm where the nutrients are fed to the plants rather than coming from Tilapia fish. After this, there is a simple process: Sprouted seeds are transplanted into sponges placed into a vertical frame system. Each group of frames has eight to ten slanted rows stacked one above the other; pipes circulate water through the system. Solar panels power the water pumps. The hardware is neither strongly technical nor complicated, notes Gupta.

The World’s Largest Vertical Farm

Until September 2016, the world’s largest vertical farm is one located in Japan. Within a 2,300 square meter building, approximately 10,000 heads of lettuce are harvested per day. According to one assessment, this is one hundred times the volume that could be produced on a similar size piece of horizontally-farmed land. In September 2016, Newark, New Jersey’s AeroFarms will take the title of the world’s largest indoor vertical farm: it will be 6,410 square meters.

Sources: weburbanist.com, MIRAI, CO. LTD, CNN

Comcrop specializes in area markets looking for vegetables with premium quality, due to reduced transportation and storage time. Soon, Comcrop will open another rooftop greenhouse nearby, focusing on leafy green vegetables. Recent Singapore legislation has mandated environmentally-friendly policies like green roofing, which is leading to growing local interest. Gupta herself is optimistic: “We see ourselves owning and operating a network of farms. People forget that agricultural possibilities include all types of spaces – even tunnels and parking lots. There are plenty of marginalized spaces in urban areas.”

Vertical farming does have limits, Gupta observes: “With hydroponics, for example, you can’t do grains or things that grow on trees, like citrus or avocados.” Crops that work well include leafy greens, tomatoes, and cucumbers. Overall, vertical farming has a valuable place in the food chain, says Gupta. Singapore’s traditional food suppliers – China, Thailand, and Malaysia – have become more prosperous, Gupta notes. “But they have their own populations to feed. So part of our answer has to be a local solution.”

From the Singapore Skies and Beyond

In 2009, Jack Ng, a Singaporean engineer and businessman, began looking toward semi-retirement – and he became more conscious than ever of his hometown’s dependence on imported food: “Singapore has achieved self-sufficiency in water but not in food. My passion is to change this.” The Sky Greens vertical farming system began as a prototype in 2010 with support from Singapore’s Agri-Food & Veterinary Authority (AVA). Sky Greens has now been in operation for four years.

Sky Greens – a vertical farm in Singapore

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The Sky Greens system is soil-based, though it can also be adapted for hydroponics. It resembles a slow nine-meter tall Ferris wheel, completing one revolution in 16 hours. Vegetable trays rotate down to obtain sufficient water and then up to the top of the tower for maximum sunlight. Overall, each tower needs only 40 Watt of electricity, the equivalent of one light bulb.

So far, Sky Greens has been able to grow “anything that could be planted in pots,” explains Ng. A majority of their plants are commercial Asian leafy vegetables and kale – at ten times the volume of a traditional open field farm in the same space.

As an engineer and businessman, Ng provides an analytical assessment: “Vertical farming solutions can address challenges of urbanization such as encroachment of farmlands.” The company continues to grow: overseas projects have been completed in Thailand and China. Sky Greens is also exploring opportunities in Malaysia and around the world.

Ultimately, Ng compares Sky Greens to a building or engineering project: “Hydroponics, which is common in vertical farming, has new automation processes, like controlled mixing of nutrients, but we always have to consider the cost viability for specific crop cultivation in different markets.” Ng pauses reflectively. “Vertical farming needs to make business sense and preserve the environment. We actively work with other greenhouse technologies and continually innovate to create solutions for sustainable food production.”

Singapore has achieved self-sufficiency in water but not in food. My passion is to change this.

Horticulture in the Sky

Volkmar Keuter is the manager for inFARMING, a vertical farming project by the Fraunhofer-Institute UMSICHT in Oberhausen, Germany. From the scenic Ruhr area of northwest Germany, inFARMING is developing high-tech horticultural systems that can be integrated into new and existing buildings. Keuter spoke with Farming’s Future about the vertical farming world.

What are the most modern ideas in vertical farming?
Today’s vertical farming looks at controlling environmental factors within these systems, like light, water, and climate control. Whether on a micro or macro level, indoors or outdoors, such as on a rooftop, vertical farming may include greenhouses, where light is boosted via LEDs.

As the project manager for a vertical farming project with Fraunhofer UMSICHT, did you have a special Ag background that led to this project?
I’m a process engineer. Most of the time I was working with water and waste-water treatment processes, so it’s not too bad to now be working on hydroponic systems. In the project’s first year, my colleagues and I decided that we shouldn’t only look at the greenhouses, but at the whole system – what we are calling inFARMING, ‘integrated farming’ – and develop efficient systems consisting of closed loops between greenhouses and the buildings, for example.

What are some of the advantages of vertical farming?Shorter transportation paths are beneficial for the environment. The crops are also fresher, with high nutritional value for the customer. However, vertical farming is only one module of future farming. The future will also combine the knowledge resources of professionals in many fields to support established farming methods.